Forgotten genius: the man who made a working VR machine in 1957

When we talk about the history of virtual reality, we usually refer to the promise of the eighties: the sci-fi movies and experimental products that first made us believe in a virtual world.

From there to here seems an eternity in terms of how far VR has come, but in truth, there have been working VR products since as far back as the 1950s. And one of the earliest still works today.

To call Morton Heilig a visionary would be to sorely undersell his brilliance. At a time when most people still owned a black-and-white TV, he hand-built a fully-functioning 3D video machine that allowed you to ride a virtual motorbike while experiencing the sounds, winds, vibrations and even smells of being on the road.

He called it the Sensorama Simulator, and it failed spectacularly.

What Heilig had built was so ahead of its time that it sat unloved by his swimming pool, hidden under a tarpaulin, for generations. His wife Marianne Heilig, who worked with him on many inventions, took on enormous debt to fund his ideas - so much so that she's still paying it off almost a decade after his death. So who was her husband, referred to by many as the Father of Virtual Reality?

"He called himself a Renaissance Man," Marianne told techradar, "because he had so many different talents. When he took me up to the apartment where he had the machine, I kind of oohed and aahed - but I didn't understand the significance of it at the time."

She wasn't the only one. An accomplished cinematographer, Heilig had created the Sensorama out of a desire to build the "cinema of the future." But a 3D cinema required 3D films, which were not easy to come by in the late 1950s.

So Heilig invented a 3D camera and projector in addition to his viewing machine, and produced five films to demonstrate the Sensorama's capabilities. These were mostly passive ride-based experiences: a helicopter, go kart, bicycle and that motorbike.

Despite the lack of user control, the films still felt real: Howard Rheingold tried the still-working Sensorama in the eighties and commented that "the motorcycle driver was reckless, which made me very mildly uncomfortable, much to my delight."

The fifth film proved popular with investors, Heilig once joked: it was a raunchy number starring a New York belly dancer. Rheingold notes that the Sensorama would pump out cheap perfume whenever she was near the camera, and the sounds of the cymbals on her fingers could be heard in the appropriate ear. As adult video in virtual reality takes off in 2016, it seems Heilig knew what people wanted before they did.

Selling the future

Morton Heilig could clearly see the commercial potential for his invention, going to great pains to detail potential uses and benefits in his 1962 patent application. The inventor envisioned his machine being used to train the armed forces, industry labourers and students, explaining that "there are increasing demands today for ways and means to teach and train individuals without actually subjecting the individuals to possible hazards of particular situations."

Giving the example of a supersonic jet, Heilig comments that actually flying the jet is a better learning experience for students than just hearing about it, but would be "impossible or dangerous," and therefore his invention would give a better idea of the situation without putting anyone in danger.

"If a student can experience a situation or an idea in about the same way that he experiences everyday life, it has been shown that he understands better and quicker, and if a student understands better and quicker, he is drawn to the subject matter with greater pleasure and enthusiasm.

"What the student learns in this manner he retains for a longer period of time," the patent goes on to say - almost as if Heilig was expecting to sell the machine directly from the filing document.

In reality, the Sensorama was pitched by leaflet to large corporations including Ford and International Harvester, described as a revolutionary new showroom display. Again, Heilig predicted the future: scores of companies now use VR as a way to showcase their products and experiences.

But in the fifties, corporations just weren't ready, and the Sensorama failed to secure sufficient investment or sales.

An alternate route to riches was to use it as an arcade machine. A coin-operated unit was installed at Universal Studios "and was making tonnes of money with the quarters people were pumping into it," Marianne recalls, "but the management at Universal Studios at the time thought it was too much for a family company, so we had to take it out and put it on piers. It was on Santa Monica pier, in Times Square, and all over. It was a good little cash machine, I tell you that!"

But quarters weren't enough to sustain an invention that had cost a fortune to produce, and so Heilig sought investors. He arranged to meet in California with one interested party, introduced to him by "a guy who owned half of San Francisco at the time," Marianne comments, "but Mort was ten minutes late and the investor just left."

The powerful man who arranged the meeting did eventually put money in himself, but "Mort just couldn't get it going" - the machine was made of many pieces he had created himself, and wasn't especially robust: when it was put into an arcade, it promptly broke.

A Gear VR for from the 1950s?

This commercial failure wasn't a first for forward-thinking Heilig. The obscure invention he patented just before the ill-fated Sensorama looks so eerily familiar, it's hard to believe it was created over half a century ago.

The majority of articles about the birth of virtual reality credit the 1968 Sword of Damocles as the first ever head-mounted VR display. But - as you may have guessed by now - Morton Heilig had something similar a full eight years earlier. His Telesphere Mask, patented in 1960, looks so uncannily modern in the patent drawings that you could be forgiven for thinking it was an early Gear VR.

Described by Heilig in his application as "a telescopic television apparatus for individual use," the Telesphere was in every way a 3D video headset of the type we're used to - except that instead of connecting to a smartphone or PC, Heilig's used miniaturised TV tubes.

"The spectator is given a complete sensation of reality, i.e. moving three dimensional images which may be in colour, with 100% peripheral vision, binaural sound, scents and air breezes," read the patent filing.

And it was still light enough to wear on your head, with adjustable ear and eye fixings. Some modern headsets can't manage that, and this was created at a time when it wasn't even certain the TV feed would be in colour.

Again, the Telesphere was a commercial failure, though it might have consoled Morton to know that a similar digital product was launched on Kickstarter 55 years later and didn't raise even half of its $50,000 funding goal.

So what happened to one of the first head-mounted displays in history? Is it on display in the Smithsonian, or taking pride of place in Mark Zuckerberg's collection?

"I have it in a wooden box," says Marianne Heilig. She dejectedly explains how she personally travelled to a Hollywood museum with the enormous Sensorama machine ("it's the size of a vending machine"), trying to make the management aware of its significance. She was told they wouldn't even take it for free.

"I've almost given up on this whole thing, but I'm not just going to give it away after a lifetime of struggle. I'm still working just to pay interest on the debt because I refuse to go bankrupt," she says with tremendous dignity.

"It's very demoralising. They'll put on [display] Marilyn Monroe's clothing and shoes, but this is the future, and it started here in 1958. I don't understand the short-sightedness of people," she sighs.

A modern legacy

While Morton Heilig went on to design successful sports products and won the Auteur's Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1974, he never gained the recognition he deserved for his tech vision. Nor did he live to see the head-mounted immersive reality he foresaw in the fifties come to fruition.

But Heilig and his pioneering inventions haven't been forgotten.

Alex Lambert, Creative Director of immersive experiences company Inition, frequently references the Sensorama machine in his presentations about VR. "It's amazing that someone did this with the rudimentary technology of the 1960s. That's some serious ambition!" he told techradar.

"The Sensorama really stands as the definitive early example of a concept that everyone is striving for: how can we use technology to create alternate realities?"

When Lambert goes on to describe his company's successful virtual reality wingsuit, the echoes of Heilig are stark - and rather eerie: "We added motion, then user-controlled motion and then wind. The wingsuit was a perfect use for VR, as it took something acutely dangerous people would otherwise be unable to do and made it instantly accessible with no training."

But Elliott Myers, creator of the soon-to-be-launched and very Sensorama-like Roto VR chair, says that even after all this time, we still haven't perfected what Heilig set out to do.

"Creating experiential simulators for entertainment (and profits) has long been seen as a holy grail. Alas, limitations of (often physically cumbersome) technology has stifled the delivery of truly immersive experiences," explains Myers. Heilig and his vending machine would agree.

"The current rebirth of VR certainly offers the visual and audio stimulus we've long anticipated. However, just as Sensorama envisaged back in the '60s, tactile feedback (wind, heat, smell and indeed taste) is still some way off [with most head-mounted devices]."

Myers' virtual reality chair uses many of the principles Heilig built into his machine. The motorised gaming seat offers wind, heat, scent and force feedback. The big difference is, the user can tilt and move to control the visuals, whereas Heilig's seat moved for you in sync with the video footage.

So what does Heilig's widow make of modern virtual reality, and its interpretation of his dream? "Just the other day I read an article in the LA Times with the headline 'Virtual reality races on' - it was on the front page. I saved it," she says. Clearly still besotted with the husband she met on a blind date, she adds: "The Oculus and the head gear, it's all very interesting, but Mort had the original."

The unknown genius

Virtual reality is almost certainly not the only development Heilig predicted - but we might never know about the others.

"I have 52 spiral notebooks full of his inventions and a lot of folders as well," says Marianne. "From common things to very imaginative and otherworldy things."

We can only speculate at what wonders those books contain - but again, instead of illustrating a coffee table tome or punctuating a Jobs-style biopic, they remain unsold and undiscovered at Marianne's home.

"I just hope the place isn't going to get a leak in the roof, because one time I had to rescue it all," she adds glumly.

It seems incredible that even in 2016, when the world has woken up to the potential of virtual reality and the prescient brilliance of Heilig's machine, that those drawings and prototypes haven't sold for millions.

That we're not all viewing his sketches in a gallery, or buying tickets to 'Sensorama: the Morton Heilig Story' (in 3D, of course), seems crazy when you hear the reactions to the ahead-of-its-time machine.

But, so often, true genius is seldom recognised until it's too late. Let's just hope by the time Heilig claims his title as the Da Vinci of VR, we haven't lost his other inventions to a leak in the roof.

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